Group items tagged

"I recently co-presented a workshop with an educator who is very different from me. She is both experienced and knowledgeable, but our beliefs about teaching and learning don't coincide, so the planning process involved much disagreement and compromise."

"Curiosity is the engine of intellectual achievement-it's what drives us to keep learning, keep trying, keep pushing forward. But how does one generate curiosity, in oneself or others? "

"ExamTime is a new service that middle school, high school, and college students can use to prepare for tests. I tend to like any service that offers a mind map option for students and ExamTime does so I had to try it out. When students signs into their ExamTime accounts they can create flashcards, mind maps, and practice quizzes to help them study. Students can arrange their materials into topics. All materials can be shared with other Examtime users. Learn more about ExamTime in the video below."

"Using tech tools that students are familiar with and already enjoy using is attractive to educators, but getting students focused on the project at hand might be more difficult because of it."

"This infographic shares the basics of tsunami's. There are three main ways that a tsunami starts, an earthquake, a landslide or a volcano. The infographic does a great job of showing how these three can begin a tsunami. The infographic then shows characteristics of a tsunami."

"Regardless of the subject, good teaching is good teaching. One new piece of tech does not change all that we know about instruction. As we develop curriculum and practices in technology we use strategies and tools we know work for students. We scaffold their learning and provide support when needed. Just like we do in reading, writing, math and content we make anchor charts for technology that guide students along the way."

"Pinterest is growing in popularity in such a way that it presumably will be the top social bookmarking platform of choice for internet users in 2013. The visual concept Pinterest is built on is behind its popularity because the human mind is constructed in such a way to allow for easy and quicker processing of visual cues better than it does with the written code."

"Historically, student engagement has been thought of in terms of students "paying attention": raising hands, asking questions, and making eye contact. Of course, we know now that learning can benefit from learner self-direction and self-initiated transfer of thinking as much as it does simple "engagement" and participation. That being said, increasing engagement and sheer participation is not a wrong-headed pursuit in and of itself, and in pursuit of that is the following infographic from Mia MacMeekin: 27 ways to increase student engagement. 27 Ways To Increase Student Engagement In Learning"

""If you're doing all that, who's doing your job?" "People only present because they think it looks good on their resume." "She's obviously all about herself, I mean, look at what she does." IMG_5438These three statements literally were shared with me this year, along with a couple others. Some to me, some with me…all about me. It's hard to hear statements like this and NOT feel as if they are attacking you personally, even though I doubt that was the intention. (er…I hope.) Last Monday at #ISTE13 I was able to go to George Couros's sesson on "Leading Innovative Change". I'm not sure what I thought this was going to be about, but I knew I wanted to see the Couros show, :) His intent was to share how his school division created a powerful vision for innovation and share the steps to guarantee success. What I heard was a defense for all that I believe in and have tried to convey as a teacher, as a technology facilitator, and as an assistant principal. What I heard was the reason I blog, tweet, and share."

"n this context, Twitter is working hard to enhance the performance of its search functionality. They have now what is called Twitter advanced search engine. Next time you use Twitter search and it does not turn up results for your desired terms, you may want to use these search operators :"

"There is an ever growing number of teachers and students using iPads for creation projects. Little by little, people are understanding that the iPad is not just a consumption device for reading emails, watching YouTube and checking FaceBook and Twitter. The iPad is a powerful creation device. But an issue arose during the year at my school: How does one share large student videos and other projects with parents? Read ahead to find out."

"The Flipped Class: What Does a Good One Look Like?"

"Popular mobile devices may come and go, but the iPad has remained a hit in the K-12 classroom. But even though they're in schools, our work with teachers has led us to understand that while many of them would like to use iPads meaningfully in their classrooms, they can't because of time, access, and training. So for the past year and a half, we've both been working with teachers and university students integrating iPad technology into the classroom in a controlled way. While doing this, we came across several outcomes that made us question and dig deeper into what the research actually says about using them in the classroom. Do students and younger teachers use them more effectively? Do they work better for some student populations? It's probably not giving much away to say that the most important learning outcome we found was that experience is the greatest teacher."

"Summer reading has been a topic of discussion by educators for decades. "Summer slide," where students lose the gains they made during the previous school year, is a topic of conversation this time of year. This learning loss has a cumulative effect and impacts students as they continue to move through school. There does not seem to be one solution for this problem, but educators can agree that we have to keep trying (McLaughlin, Smink, 2010)."

"Hello, I am Sam Patterson and this is Beyond The Hour of Code, a podcast dedicated to helping teachers use programming and creative self-expression in the learning experiences they design for their students. This episode is about . . . Chapter seven of my book exploring the instructional models most useful for robot-based learning in the primary grades. This is the last in a mini-series of "how to teach with robots" posts. Robot as Constant Robots used in a lesson should be used to their full potential. What does a robot do? Exactly what you tell it to do. Pedagogically, to capitalize on this, think about the robot serving the role of "constant" in an experiment. Ask a robot to roll forward at fifty percent power for two seconds and that is exactly what it will do. How far will it go? That depends on so many things outside of the robot and its programming. This space, just outside of the robot and its programming, is where teachers build the learning experience."

"However talented, no one is a natural-born teacher. Honing the craft takes significant care and effort, not just by the individual, but also by the school at large. Though experience does matter, it matters only to the extent that a teacher -- regardless of how long he or she has been in the classroom -- commits to continued professional development to refresh his or her status as a transformational teacher. Along those lines, even after a decade in the classroom, I don't claim to be beyond criticism -- not in the least. Still, I wish to offer some advice on constantly striving toward perfection, however elusive that goal will always remain."

"According to Marc-André Lalande,  "a Personal Learning Network is a way of describing the group of people that you connect with to learn their ideas, their questions, their reflections, and their references. Your PLN is not limited to online interactions, but it is that online, global interactive part that really makes it special. It is personal because you choose who's part of that group; you choose if you want to lurk-just check out what people are saying-or if you share; because you choose when to do so, and how to do so." As for this graphic? You can thank Sylvia Duckworth, who always does a great job sharing simple sketch notes to help teachers. (She also took our 12 Rules of Great Teaching and created a predictably wonderful graphic to supplement the text, among others.) We've taken her graphic and provided starting points for each 'reason' a teacher need a PLN."

"One of the conversations was going back to the idea of Twitter and does it actually promote literacy.  Thinking about, jumping onto Twitter years ago has led to many amazing opportunities for me, but I also think that it has led to tremendous growth in my own learning over time.  Since I first started connecting with others through the medium, I have written over 88,000 tweets, written over 1,100 blog posts, and one book.  I am a firm believer that if you want to become better at writing, the best way to do it is to write more. Without connecting on Twitter, I truly believe that I would not have written in the other mediums.  I have started blogs before, but never made it past a few posts.  As for a book?  I doubt that was something I would have ever done without Twitter.  I am not the only one; so many educators that have connected through the medium have written and published their own books.  I have seen people criticize that so many educators are writing books now, and I think, "Wow! So many educators are writing books now!"  Educators sharing their wisdom with different audiences all over the world is a pretty powerful thing."

"Technology can be a powerful tool to assist students with special needs or any sort of learning challenge. In particular the Chrome web browser allows users to install a wide variety of web extensions that provide tools that can help all learners, regardless of ability level. In this blog post we will take a look at 21 Chrome web extensions that can assist students in five main categories: Text to Speech Readability Reading Comprehension Focus Navigation Some of the tools fit into more than one topic, but each is only listed once. Certainly this list does not cover all of the useful web extensions available for struggling learners, but it is a great place to begin. In addition to the list of extension, I have also linked in the video and help guide from a webinar I did a while back on "Google Tools for Special Needs"."